


foolish, fragile spine

by aruariandance



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Gen, One-sided feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 03:51:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5482310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aruariandance/pseuds/aruariandance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His girlfriend tells him, “You’ll never really love anyone, will you,” and Oikawa thinks, don’t flatter yourself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	foolish, fragile spine

A few weeks into summer his girlfriend tells him, “You’re going to be smiling the day you die,” and Oikawa wonders why the hell that’s such an unforgivable thing. His girlfriend tells him, “You’ll never really love anyone, will you,” and Oikawa thinks, don’t flatter yourself.

He tells Iwaizumi and Matsukawa and Hanamaki before practice the next day, and they all roll their eyes, predictably, and Hanamaki says, “I don’t really think that’s the problem,” which isn’t in his usual catalog of snarky remarks, but Oikawa doesn’t ask anything about what that’s supposed to mean. They run suicides in the gym and he forgets what he’d even been worried about in the first place. 

He loves the strength volleyball gives him. He loves the strain, the ache, the tension. He knows what it likes to be weak, and the thinks that’s why he’s so good at being strong. 

“He’s such a small thing,” his auntie used to say, when she thought he wouldn’t understand what that meant. “Hopefully he grows into the man his father is, someday.”

“You’re just as horrible as dad,” his sister says, some many years later, and her voice is quiet as she holds her swollen belly in her lap. “Always trying to be better than everyone else. What are you trying to prove, Tooru?” He doesn’t answer her, and she looks down. “I’m not going to let him grow up like that.” 

“Don’t focus on what other people think, dumbass,” Iwaizumi says, eyes deep and knowing. “You’re more than enough, just as you are. You’re strong because you’re you.”

Oikawa’s proud of the lines in him, the grooves of muscle below his ribcage and the subtle power in his wingspan, his fierce litheness, the balance and proportion that wasn’t always there but he’s worked so hard to have, harder than anyone really knows. Running used to make him feel weak, but the push and pull of the forward motion makes him feel strong now. His legs carry him farther than he’s supposed to go, sometimes, but he loses track of the miles around the second time they lose to Shiratorizawa. 

“Right, so,” Oikawa says, collapsing backwards onto the couch. “I’m thinking of maybe, like. Getting drunk tonight.”

“Allow me to write a lengthy dissertation on why that’s a bad idea,” Matsukawa says, and Hanamaki says, “My dad has fifty year old wine in the basement.”

Iwaizumi stays sober, because he always does, and around the time Oikawa starts disappearing to the bathroom for longer and longer stretches of time, he nearly breaks down the door to catch him with his finger down his throat. 

“I’ll feel better if I do,” Oikawa says, and Iwaizumi throws him a towel, and a water bottle, and sits with him on the bathroom floor for the rest of the night. They don’t talk about anything, and every so often Oikawa hiccups around a painful retch, but he holds back, and spends the night in Iwaizumi’s bed. For years, this has been a normal part of what it means for them to be best friends, childhood friends, two halves of a whole. They’re more than brothers, more than inseparable, but not remotely romantic, nothing passionate or gritty, nothing that justifies the way Oikawa clings to his space and misses him even when they’re in the same room, in the same bed. 

“You fucking beat me half to death in your sleep last night,” Iwaizumi says the next morning. “I’m gonna have to start restraining you.”

Oikawa smiles. It’s mostly teeth. “Are you offering to tie me down to your bed, Iwa-chan?”

A withering glance. “You wish.”

He thinks about messages carved into the temples of delphi ( _nothing in excess_ , he thinks) and decides he doesn’t believe in prophecies. He’s an architect of his own destiny and he’s going to win, even if it’s probably not what he really needs, or wants. He’s going to win because if he doesn’t what else is he supposed to be doing; who else is he supposed to be.

“You should probably stop screwing around playing video games with your friends, Tooru. Go for a run,” his dad says.

“Bring a girl home for dinner next week, Tooru. We see more of Hajime-kun then your girlfriends,” his dad says. 

“Shiratorizawa-- that’s raw power. What’s your strategy for this year, Tooru? Because I can tell you right now, you’re going to need a whole new regimen if you want a shot at winning,” his dad says. 

“Your sister needs to be a little harder on Takeru. That kid’s getting bullied because she’s raising him too soft,” his dad says. 

Just before their third year, Oikawa’s new girlfriend says, “Where do you go, sometimes, Tooru,” and it takes him a solid minute to realize she’s spoken.

On the new year, Oikawa goes to Hiroshima with his mother to visit his grandparents and he’s struck with the silence of the small town they reside in, how ghosts of noise creep in and out but never linger longer than a breeze. He trips in the snow, not used to the sink and pull of it, or the chill that rattles around between his bones. Takeru laughs at him, his two front teeth conspicuously gone. He isn’t clumsy, easing through the snow like a pro, and Oikawa thinks, yeah, he’s strong, too.

His mind drifts to radioactivity, and splitting atoms, and being vaporized right into the atmosphere a few times, and he catches himself, feeling misplaced in his guilt. His grandmother tells him, “You’re third generation hibakusha, which means you have less shame to bear,” and he goes for a walk to the convenience store for daidai (for Takeru) and datemaki, lets the snow collect on his hair and clothes like residual fallout. 

“You need to stop breaking their hearts,” Iwaizumi says, eyes serious but far away. Him and Oikawa stand on the sidelines of the court, watching their team, directing them, guiding them, building them. There’s not much time left. “That black eye looks pretty rough.”

“I didn’t think she would punch me,” Oikawa says, fingering the bruise. “It’s not like we even dated that long.”

Iwaizumi hums, stretches the length of his arm over his chest. He keeps his eyes on the court as he says, “Date a girl with lower expectations.”

“That’s mean, Iwa-chan. You’re saying that I’m disappointing.”

“No,” Iwaizumi says. “You’re just not honest.”

“What does that mean,” Oikawa says, but then Kindaichi calls him over to ask for help with hand signals, and he forgets to ask Iwaizumi later. They practice day and night for weeks, practice matches with teams from all over the prefecture and beyond. The countdown to their last chance with Shiratorizawa feels like a prolonged, spirited funeral march. 

“I told you already, dumbass,” Iwaizumi says, and he smiles, like it’s all easy. “You’re more than enough, just as you are.”

And it was exactly what he needed to hear from exactly the right person at exactly the right moment, some tiny butterfly wing of kairos, sends him leaping forward onto the court. 

They lose, anyway. 

It’s less devastating than it is disorienting. 

“I really thought we would win,” Oikawa says. “I really thought we would be good enough.” 

“We are good enough,” Iwaizumi says, fierce and honest and all those things Oikawa envies about him. “Stop talking like we aren’t good enough, we are.” He pauses. “Don’t let him get in your head, Oikawa.” 

“Don’t act like you understand everything,” Oikawa says, and leaves their clubroom, and doesn’t find the time to go back for the rest of the term. 

“It’s a real shame, Tooru,” his dad says, keeps saying, never stops saying. He doesn’t look at him. “Just… a shame. You could have really gone all the way. But, well. Strength speaks for itself.”

And it’s not so much that Oikawa is ignoring his best friend, it’s just that he’s lost track of time completely, the days blend and blur into opaque swaths that hurriedly escape him. He looks down at his phone, sees all the missed calls and unread texts, and tucks his cell into his back pocket. When his dad comes home from work that night, he goes for another run. 

It’s like the collective everything is nearing the end of a mile long fuse that’s been lit for awhile now, and the inevitable detonation comes when: 

“I’m going to Waseda,” Iwaizumi says. 

Oikawa swears his chest breaks right open. 

“Oh,” Oikawa says. “Well, at least I don’t have to worry about the competition, then.”

It’s like someone’s holding a pillow to his face, a pillow made out of that special textile blend of grief and fear and spite. 

“You don’t have to be so cruel,” his girlfriend says later, crying, hands covering her face. “I get it, you don’t want to do long distance. I get it. But you don’t have to be so cruel.”

He makes the move to Bunkyo, and Todai is pretty much everything he expects it to be, everything people tell him it is, and his dad says, “Don’t let me down again, Tooru.”

He throws himself deep into the undertow of volleyball at university and it’s good. It’s good in a way that makes him forget to find another girlfriend. It’s good in a way that keeps him busy busy busy, mind always distant, body on the cusp of exhaustion, too forgetful to call back home or keep in touch with his friends, it’s. Good. 

“Haven’t heard from Hajime in a while,” Matsukawa says and it’s kind of a rare occasion, for them to be out drinking together like this, but his friend can be surprisingly persistent. 

“We talked yesterday, he’s fine,” Oikawa says, and he hasn’t seen or heard from Iwaizumi in weeks, hasn’t even tried to call him. He’s not sure why he lies. 

The next day he runs five miles without stopping, without drinking any water, without even realizing. 

Because, lately, he’s living in vertical slices, not horizontal stretches, and he lacks both the vision and the energy to understand those slices as parts of a greater whole, a linear whole, one where each moment fits between the one before and the one after. 

He feels the wind whistle his teeth dry and cold, laughing, and races full speed towards a sweet blank nothing, laughing, and whets corners of himself into the sharpest points possible, laughing. 

It’s a surprise to no one when he overdoes it and hurts himself. 

“Do you feel good about it?” 

“I feel adrenaline. And yeah, the adrenaline feels good.”

Sometimes he feels flayed and raw all over and it’s hard when anything touches him, clothes and conversation are abrasive, even the softest kinds of both. But he still calls Iwaizumi, finds the right timing, and then leaves a message when he doesn’t answer. He wakes up in the middle of the night soaked with sweat and thirsty and sticks his head under the faucet in the bathroom and drink big fast gulps of water and when he come back out he stands in the doorway for a second to let his eyes adjust to the dark so he doesn’t trip over his books on the way back to bed. He thinks ‘trip over my books’ but he also means trip over the five used coffee mugs scattered around his chair, the unopened boxes he never unpacked. He did vacuum last week, though.

“We’re thinking of going to Hokkaido,” his mother tells him one morning. “Me and your father. It’s so lonely living in this house without you kids, and he has his family up there, you know, and he can get transferred to his company’s northern branch. We’ll be a little far, but, well. What’s left for us in Miyagi, you know?”

“Yeah,” Oikawa says. “Yeah, you’re right. That makes sense.”

He calls Iwaizumi as soon as they hang up, and he doesn’t answer, again, and then he calls Hanamaki, who says he caught up with Iwaizumi a few days ago, he’s just so busy, he’s got classes and a girlfriend and a job and he’s doing well with his new team, it’s fine, everything is great, he’s just so busy--

Oikawa finally gets ahold of Iwaizumi a week later.

“Way to drop off the face of the earth,” Oikawa says. 

“Life has been hectic,” Iwaizumi says, and Oikawa imagines him wrapping an arm around his girlfriend's waist, pressing his lips into her hair.

“Still, you couldn’t find five minutes to talk, Iwa-chan? Lame excuse.”

“You didn’t say a word to me during our last two months in Miyagi,” Iwaizumi says, and oh. Huh. 

“I was kinda. I think I was mourning,” Oikawa says quietly. “And my dad, he was, well.”

“Right,” Iwaizumi says. He sounds tired. “I know. I just wish you hadn’t run away from us… from me.” The line goes quiet, so that Oikawa can hear how Iwaizumi licks his lips in hesitation. “I just thought that we were different, you know. You have all this shit, all this heaviness inside you-- because of, of your dad, and because of your insecurity, but you have more to be proud of than anyone else I know. And well, you have me, idiot.” 

The day before Oikawa had left home for university they had watched hours of old home videos, him, his dad, his sister, her husband, and Takeru, and Oikawa was terribly, shockingly moved to see himself, the tiny fledgling person of him. He thinks about that child right now: his big deep dark eyes, so excitable and earnest and so, so bright. The way he drew the world into himself instead of putting himself out into it. He cradles his spark inside him, inside cupped palms, protecting him from the hurt. Oikawa wants the world for him, he realizes; he want every second of breath and blood and bones, all strung together to stretch as far as the eye can see, to be unambiguously genuine. 

_“You’re more than enough, just as you are. You’re strong because you’re you.”_

Oikawa says, “I’ve missed you so much, Iwa-chan,” and doesn’t cry. He says, “I want to see you so badly. Can I-- is it alright if I visit you soon?”

“Yeah... I want to see you, too,” Iwaizumi says, maybe centuries later, and Oikawa realizes that the world begins and ends with those simple words. 

They talk for an hour and it’s good, really good, and also terrifyingly harrowing and he can’t process it properly for a few minutes because it’s too jarring but it’s a fresh, clean pain, not the timeless, spaceless, hopeless pain of the last few months, and it’s funny because he feels better in a personal sense, a little less on the fence about continuing to exist on the planet, but this new wound is still sharper than anything else before, keen and acute. He goes for a run after, even though the weather is awful, and his knee is shot, and turns his face up to the rain and stands there for a while, just feeling it cool and light on his swollen eyes, his hot cheeks, washing away layers of tears and snot and unshakeable anguish. 

And it’s weird, because the part of him that hurts and hurts and _hurts_ is the same part of him that can’t get enough of what it is to feel this way at all.

**Author's Note:**

> i’ve been having a really awful time this past week and i wrote something sad and disjointed as i feel, oops
> 
> thanks for reading <3


End file.
